Maybe this is not a smart question but I'm writing a bash script that should do something like this: start a process of application A, wait for it to exit, and after some time (e.g. 10 seconds), do the rest of the script. How can I tell bash to wait 10 seconds doing no-ops? Maybe I could write a loop that catches the system time, test whether the time is up and continue/break? But this doesn't seem to be a precise timing procedure.